: Amazon is producing and airing a concert with Nora Jones, Bill Maher, and Bob Dylan for its 10th anniversary.

I’ll just bet this marks the start of Amazon 2.0: the content company.

Amazon was in the distribution business and it did a great job of finding new efficiencies and market shares and customer needs in it.

But distribution has been dethroned as a business. Owning the broadcast tower still makes you money — but as your audience departs for limitless new competition, it won’t grow. Owning a cable franchise is a great monopoly — but growth is there mostly because you can sell new services, broadband and VOIP, and before you know it, you’ll be nothing but the pipe: the next telco. Owning a monopoly newspaper used to be a great business — until more efficient marketplaces replaced yours and your presses and trucks and Teamsters suddenly looked not like a strength but like a cost. When I went to work for the Newhouses, I got excited at the prospect of working with Random House, which they then owned, but my boss wisely told me it wasn’t what a thought — “it’s just a distribution business,” he said.

Amazon was in the distribution business. But now it has relationships with millions of customers and a network of sales people — that is, its own customers writing reviews and creating valuable data about likes and dislikes. Now it has a brand that is trusted for content. Now it can enter the content business. Why not produce a show or a book directly for Amazon and sell it there? Why not turn Amazon into a powerhouse of advertising targeted to both content and consumer?

When that concert is performed, I’ll be watching the Amazon Channel.

: Ernie Miller says it’s not a channel. He’s right. In fact, I put this the wrong way: Amazon isn’t a content company, then, producing content itself. Amazon is not a network. But Amazon is a networking company, putting together buyers and sellers, readers and writers (and vice versa). So what I meant to say is that sometime soon, someone will chose to publish via Amazon directly to the public and skip the middleman formerly known as the publisher. That makes Amazon merely a conduit. One could say that it’s about distribution but in the case of digital content, the distribution is meaningless. It’s just a place that helps A find B. It’s a maven.

Why must Amazon be a “channel”? Why must we watch streaming media to see the concert? Why not a dowload? Why not some RSS? While the concept of Amazon as content producer doesn’t bother me too much, I wonder why they would be any better than anyone else at it. I also think it would ultimately corrupt their work to make connections between works, to be able to say cleanly that people who bought A also bought B, the temptation to fiddle with the numbers to push their content to the front might be too great.

http://www.buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis

Ernie: Right you are.
And I’ll address your other point on the post…

http://www.benyehudapress.com Larry Yudelson

“someone will chose to publish via Amazon directly to the public and skip the middleman formerly known as the publisher”
That’s why they bought Booksurge. It’s not so much that Amazon *isn’t* in the distribution business; it’s that they’re the only one still in it. The printing/fulfillment/warehouse/distribution side of Random House goes to Amazon; the editorial side goes to Amazon’s customers.
Another way to look at it is to see how the risk has spread. It used to be the author bore some and the printing side of the publisher bore some. The editorial side bore some in theory, but everyone was pretty much on salary.
Now, Amazon bears no risk. Cute, no?
The upside, though, is that there’s an opportunity for small publishers to take over the editorial side from the Newhouses of the world. Once Amazon can handle the printing and distribution, and give me a channel for marketing, there’s room for someone with a niche editorial vision.
That, at any rate, is what I’m telling the investors in my new publishing company….

A reader

“So what I meant to say is that sometime soon, someone will chose to publish via Amazon directly to the public and skip the middleman formerly known as the publisher…”
Uhm…people have been doing that for years now. The Amazon Advantage program is just one example.